Archive for February 2019

Druids have grappled with Christianity since it first arrived in Europe. While today we might take St. Augustine at his word (“that which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist”*), exploring it in new and creative ways (tell me yours and I’ll tell you mine!), most people throughout Christian history have understood the assertion as narrowly as possible. That is, Christ started a new religion focused on belief in the divine power of his sacrificial death and resurrection, which saves the believer. Pairing this with a transformation in awareness, the convert takes on a new life in Christ.

For many, however, Jesus Christ, or least the religion that bears his name, is problematic at best. (To choose just one among myriad issues to explore, note that neither Druids nor non-Druids use the name Taliesin, for instance, as a “swear-word”!) Many non-Christians today have suffered from unloving and aggressive evangelism, family harassment, workplace tension, physical threats and social ostracism, whether they practice a non-Christian spirituality or simply remain “outside” the Christian church.

I’m addressing this series of posts, then, primarily to a vast “excluded middle” — neither the “born-again” believer nor the scarred (and possible tarred and feathered) “heretic”, but the people awake to the “magical and generous” possibilities all around us, because you’ve already experienced them, and they answer a deep hunger in you like nothing else can.

Or as Krista comments:

Dean, I’m always especially interested when you write on this particular topic. Having been raised in the Christian Faith, and having had no quarrel with the Christianity of my youth, my own Druid practice always has something of a Christian flavor to it even though I no longer consider myself a Christian. But I don’t consider myself Pagan either. Always was a bit of a square peg. So throughout my Druid journey I’ve become very comfortable blending and assimilating and it works quite well in my private practice. It’s a bit more challenging in community practice, but I’m working on it and I adapt when it’s called for. I think it would do the Druid community a world of good to acknowledge, and have more discussion about, different Druid perspectives rather than focusing almost exclusively on the Pagan perspective. Thanks for taking it on!

One less-than-flattering label for this is syncretism. But religions and spiritualities, just like most human cultures, thrive by cross-pollination, as careful study of them across time will bear out. Similarly, in our genetics we’re mongrels, hybrids, blends, mixes. (Our sometimes uncomfortable surprise at recent DNA test-results illustrates one aspect of this.) Our current sensitivity to “cultural appropriation” is our heightened awareness of the violence behind forcible mis-appropriations. Or as John Beckett puts it bluntly in his The Path of Paganism, “Always credit your sources, never pretend to be something you’re not, and steal from the best”. It’s the lack of credit, the pretense, and the poor selection that make up most of our problems with shoddy cultural (mis)appropriation. The “weekend guru” offering workshops, intensives and retreats, and cashing in on an inferior grab of unacknowledged and imperfectly-mastered practices from another culture currently perceived as somehow more “authentic” or “powerful”, gives all borrowing and mixing a bad name.

[Lest you take issue with the possibly glib tone of John’s “triad of appropriation” above, let’s hear him at greater length from a recent post:

Are you being respectful to the traditions and cultures you’re drawing from, or are you grabbing whatever looks shiny to you? Are you working with them as whole systems, or as mix and match entrees on a spiritual buffet? And as a polytheist, my biggest concern: are you treating the Gods as holy powers and as persons with whom we can form relationships, or as objects to be used where and how you see fit?]

/|\ /|\ /|\

Another under-explored overlap is Druid and Hindu practice | another link | a third link | which offers some very provocative insights into cultural similarity and preservation of ancient traditions over long periods of time, and at “opposite ends” of the Indo-European area of cultural and linguistic origins and influence. Everything from archetypal themes in stories, to names of gods, music and musical instruments, and spiritual practices, show common ground in the cultures of Celts and the peoples of the Indian subcontinent.

And so I write these posts partly in the spirit of “doing the Druid community a world of good to acknowledge, and have more discussion about, different Druid perspectives rather than focusing almost exclusively on the Pagan perspective”. And as always, I’m exploring my own practices and perspectives as I go — one of the chief benefits of blogging.

The EMPRESS

The Empress of the traditional deck, with her 12-star crown and sceptre, and the astronomical symbol of Venus next to her chair or throne, is another goddess figure. As an aspect or representation of the energies along the journey of the Fool or Seeker, she grounds us in the earth. The wheat growing at her feet, the waterfall to her left, the forest behind her, all place her “in the world” of both fruitfulness and change. Whether as Mother Earth, or Mary, or another goddess, or a living but impersonal archetype, or the fertile and fruitful energies within us, the Empress is a potent force and presence.

As Caitlin and John Matthews describe Guinevere in their version** of this card, as “the Empress of Logres (the Inner Britain), she creates the conditions for growth, establishing peace and contentment. She spins a thread of inner concord which is woven into the fabric of the land and its people. She imparts sensitivity to nature and harmonious awareness of all life” (The Arthurian Tarot. Thorsons, 1995, pg. 28).

What is the “thread of concord” between you and the land where you live? Only you can answer that: it can become a practice first to find out, and then to honor it in ways that you work out between you and the land. A grounding exercise of weaving or braiding a thread to carry with you as a reminder may help incarnate this awareness. Ritual can serve our need here, as in so many places.

What are the “conditions for growth” for whatever you wish to bring into your life? How can you begin to work them into your day to day work and awareness, so that they can manifest what you need? How can you serve others who are doing the same? Asking the questions can help the chance manifest, if I’m paying attention. If not, then next time around.

Archetypes, it should be said, aren’t something to “believe in”, and even less something to “worship” — though you certainly can if you choose to. (Let us know how it goes — you may discover something valuable to share.) Instead, and probably a better use of our energies and attention and time, they’re something to work with to see what they can help us do and understand about our lives.

The EMPEROR

The Emperor in the traditional deck hews to traditional symbols and representations of patriarchal power: beard, crown, scepter, throne, armor, harsh and rather sterile landscape, rams’ horns adorning the throne’s arms and back. (It can be helpful for such reasons to consult other decks for different images and symbolism.) The fact that we’re experiencing the negative effects of imbalanced masculine energies in our lives simply tells us a piece of what needs healing and re-balancing. Scan most headlines and you realize many people haven’t a clue about how to begin to do this — itself a measure of how out of balance the energies have become for many. We’ve often jettisoned outmoded forms of spirituality, true — but neglected to replace them.

The Emperor’s number 4 is also represents the fullness of the human world, four-square in its founding on the four physical elements, before we shift our awareness to spiritual realities within and beyond them. The Pagan and Christian star alike points to the five-fold nature of all things, both physical and non-physical — a vital reminder of how the cosmos is constituted, which we overlook, and have overlooked, to our peril.

The spiritual, you might say, is what the physical *is* under its mask. Or to say it another way, the spiritual is always clear and apparent; it’s the physical that’s the mystery, the cloak, the concealer, the mist-filled branching off the path. We have simply forgotten to work our polarity magic, to walk a spiritual path of stewardship, to put it in Christian terms — we’ve thrown our planet out of balance over time, and now must spend at least as much time over the coming decades and centuries working to bring it back into balance and harmony.

The HIEROPHANT

The figure in the traditional deck of the Hierophant, the “one who shows the holy”, may bring further associations of institutional authority and entrenched structures and imbalances.

Some decks re-order these first few cards, change their genders and assign them different symbolism, in an attempt to represent one or another version of a more balanced set of images. In the Matthews’ Arthurian deck the card depicts the bard Taliesin, the poet-as-way-shower-of-the-holy, especially of ways that stand outside formal structures and institutions. Today we find our bards and prophets among artists and performers, actors and politicians.

(Check out fansites and Facebook, Twitter and other social media, if you want to know how much the words and music and performances of artists matter to so many, if you don’t already have a deep appreciation for the power wielded by a multitude of visions and their visionaries. Again and again, people post how a performance or a lyric saved their lives, brought them down from suicide, changed their outlooks, gave them strength and courage and a vision to persevere through often impossible circumstances.)

Like the Hierophant, Taliesin is a guardian of tradition. We know all too well the dangers of distorted and abusive holders of traditional authority and power. Seemingly every other day, headlines trumpet the fall of another person — often a man — from a position of trust, authority and power. Such things have given tradition a bad name — except, again, in our modern reverence for everyone else’s traditions except our own. Traditional holders of wisdom, Native American or Tibetan or Mayan, still retain something of the original value that a tradition is meant to preserve.

For the other and often neglected face of tradition is that conserving function. We may conceive of tradition as “guarding from”, but more as “guarding for”. In his Elves, more than in any other expression in his fantasy works, Tolkien captures the sense both of preserving much wisdom and beauty through time, and of pervasive sadness at its seemingly inevitable loss. To cite just one example, even among the more hopeful, Gandalf addresses Aragorn in Book 6, Chapter 5 of The Lord of the Rings:

This is your realm, and the heart of the greater realm that shall be. The Third Age of the world is ended, and the new age is begun; and it is your task to order its beginning and to preserve what may be preserved. For though much has been saved, much must now pass away.

Our contemporary sense of loss and disorientation at our crumbling institutions, corrupt as some of them have become, is also an opportunity to reconnect with legitimate traditions, many preserved inwardly by their keepers, where we can recover them through vision, gratitude, ritual, and readiness and humility to ask for guidance. Taliesin, in the Matthews’ rendering, is one such preserver or conservator. He “sits in a firelit hall. He tells the story of his initiatory transformations to two children who sit at his feet listening intently. The golden links of tradition pass from his hands to theirs” (The Arthurian Tarot, pg. 30).

And our efforts in this quest (“lest any man should boast” as Christian scripture says [Ephes 2:9] of “works”, which by themselves can never be the only component of a quest) are part of our purification, our testing, a step along the path, not the sole key to growth. We are each one being in a cosmos of other beings, each with intentions and purposes, some which can align with ours. The hand of tradition, the wisdom of the Ancestors, the spiritual reality of the worlds, reaches out to grasp ours when we show we are ready.

In this next series of seven posts, I’ll be following a classic Tarot interpretation of the Fool as the querent or seeker who journeys through the aspects and archetypes of the Major Arcana. And I’ll be writing from some perspectives I hope will be useful to Druid-Christian travelers along the Green Ways of Spirit, and will in turn inspire comments and insights from you that can enrich us all. Take this as rough draft — I’m working it out as I go.

[Note: The tarot images used here, from the original Rider-Waite Tarot, are now in the public domain in the U.S.]

FOOL or SEEKER

So important is the animal accompanying the Fool from the outset that almost every deck includes some creature accompanying the human figure of the Fool.

Whether we see this as our animal inheritance, part of our make-up as a physical being with age-old drives and instincts, or as a guide or companion distinct from us, the dog (or three birds in the Arthurian tarot) is with us from the beginning.

Why a fool? Nearly every significant tradition on the planet counsels us against arrogance or hubris, and in no place is this caution more needful than on our own spiritual journeys. “Let no one deceive himself. If any of you thinks he is wise in this age, he should become a fool, so that he may become wise” (1 Cor 4:10). The classic Zen master seeks to help a student recover that “original face, the one you had before you were born”.

Echoing this insight is the old Victorian Bard William Blake, a holy fool himself, who also said, “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees”. Want an interesting exercise? Ask in meditation or dream to see the trees of the Fool.

Are they the trees of Paradise? The Medieval Legend of the Rood or Cross follows the main story line of the Biblical narrative with a tree or trees continually reappearing in different guises, first in Eden, then as a seed from that original tree buried with Adam’s body at Golgotha, to become — depending on the versions — part of Noah’s Ark, a bridge that the Queen of Sheba crosses, and eventually the Cross that Christ dies on.

(Where is the seed planted in me to disrupt all my false and narrow assumptions? What tree lifts its branches in my life, sending me places I’d never go on my own?)

And similarly, too, in Tolkien’s Silmarillion: there he recounts stories of how the Light from the original Holy Trees in Valinor is captured in the Silmaril gems, those greatest achievements of the Elven Feanor, whose name means “Spirit of Fire”, and follows their dramatic history through the volume. Trees, Light, Fire: we have them with us as we travel, even as we have the solace and guidance of an animal companion by our sides.

C. S. Lewis in his final novel, Till We Have Faces, draws on the Greek myth of Cupid and Psyche. The title echoes a line in the novel: “How can [the gods] meet us face to face till we have faces?” Lewis explained this to a correspondent, writing that a human “must be speaking with its own voice (not one of its borrowed voices), expressing its actual desires (not what it imagines that it desires), being for good or ill itself, not any mask”. In one way, then, the Great Work is to be me, the original self, wearing the face I had before I was born, “because no one comes to Spirit except through me”.

Ask an ancestor to show you an original face.

We might also see the sequence of cards coming after the Fool as masks that the Fool tries on along the journey, learning from each role or incarnation or experience, but never wholly defined by any of them. Or, alternatively, as initiations each soul must experience on its journey. (Looking for just four? Try the Elemental Sacraments that appear in the life of Jesus and offer themselves as well in slightly different guises to Druid and Pagan generally. And if you’re like me, you remember you may experience each one multiple times along you spiral path. I prime the pump occasionally and try one out myself, if it hasn’t come along recently on its own.)

MAGICIAN

The Magician, numbered 1 in most decks, is a prime number, expressive of unity, the fullness of Awen, of Spirit before creative activity begins on the physical plane. The serpent that forms his belt recalls the admonition to be “wise as serpents and innocent as doves”.

As a lightning-rod for spirit, one hand raised to heaven or fire, one lowered to earth, garbed in fire and pure white, the lemniscate figure-8 of infinity above his head, he is a potent figure for many. And another mask.

In the Golden Tarot, the Magician is Christ, beast-Master, Lord of Animals, able to communicate with them in ways many humans have often lost and must work to regain. He knows as well the beast nature and the human nature, honoring and blessing them both. In our steps along the spiral, we sometimes cut ourselves off from what some have called our elder brothers and sisters.

Ask the spirit in all things to help you see how to participate in healing the breach.

In Hindu myth we enter the worlds with an adi karma, an initial nudge that lands us in physical bodies, and sets our feet on the spiral journey back home. “True voyage”, says U. K. LeGuin innocently, “is return”.

What is it about being human? The German poet Rilke exclaims in the first of his masterwork, the Duino Elegies:

Ah, who then can
we make use of? Not Angels: not men,
and the resourceful creatures see clearly
that we are not really at home
in the interpreted world.

Some versions render it our interpreted world. We’re the ones, after all, who filter experience through memory, intention, language, culture, emotion, training, expectation — a whole set of potent magical transformations animals only partially know, filters which immeasurably enrich our lives but also deeply complicate them. The Magician is master of transformations, able to ride successive changes but not be overwhelmed by them.

I enter each card in imagination and look around. What can I see, smell, hear, imagine, receive in hints and glimpses?

How can I find a home in this world? How can I be a refuge on the road for others here like me?

The HIGH PRIESTESS

In the Matthews’ Arthurian Tarot, the figure is the Lady of the Lake. In both decks — the Rider-Waite pictured here, and in the Arthurian deck, in contrast to the Fire-red of the Magician, we see the Water-blue of the Priestess or Lady. Launched into the world of polarity, we encounter a different kind of initiation, and Initiator.

While there is great wisdom in the occult maxim of Dion Fortune that “All the gods are one god, and all the goddesses are one goddess, and there is one initiator”, it’s also true that many people have experienced the Powers of the Worlds as distinct beings, and until we have experience of them ourselves we may wisely keep silent about them. We already know from childhood onward that what’s true on the physical plane may not work on other planes, and vice versa. Try out the effortless flight of the astral dream world on earth, and gravity has a way of asserting its own reality regardless of our wishes or beliefs.

With a crescent “moon at her feet”, and also featured in her headdress, the High Priestess is in some ways an embodiment of Isis, and of Mary as well. She has her own balance, seated between the Pillars of Force of much classical magic practice, and positioned in front of a garden of fruit trees. With both the equal-armed cross on her breast and the title “tora(h)” or book of laws in her lap, she is a complex of many meanings, all worth exploring. “May your word to me be fulfilled”, goes one version of Mary’s words to the angelic message and messenger at the Annunciation. The fulfillment of the word “tora” may be as “rota” or wheel: the Fool’s journey or spiral continues.

But the feminine is not passive, as the stereotype often runs. Possibilities are endlessly sent to us by spirit, by the cosmos rippling its energies through every one of its creatures. We can refuse them. And we often do.

What law governs this moment? What is still spinning in my life? What annunciations come to me each day? What words have I accepted and allowed to fulfill themselves? What and who have I turned away from the door?

Poet and rocker Malcolm Guite writes in his poem “Annunciation”:

We see so little, stayed on surfaces,
We calculate the outsides of all things,
Preoccupied with our own purposes
We miss the shimmer of the angels’ wings,
They coruscate around us in their joy
A swirl of wheels and eyes and wings unfurled,
They guard the good we purpose to destroy …

We’re invited more often than we know to say yes to things that terrify us. We’ve imbibed our fears along with the advertisers’ marketing jingles that we know through repetition even if we despise the product. If repetition can accomplish so much, let me turn it to my purposes, rather than somebody else’s. As author Peter Beagle famously declares, “We are raised to honor all the wrong explorers and discoverers — thieves planting flags, murderers carrying crosses. Let us at last praise the colonizers of dreams”.

Or to turn to another great Bard, the late Leonard Cohen, who sings in “Anthem”, with great Druid counsel:

The birds, they sang
At the break of day
Start again, I heard them say.

Yeah, the wars
They will be fought again
The holy dove
She will be caught again
Bought and sold and bought again
The dove is never free.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack, a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

No, the dove is never free, not till spiral’s end, but the Light keeps getting in. The dove keeps descending, bringing the blessings of spirit, keeps setting out from the Ark to find land after flood, keeps returning with a leaf in its beak, keeps on keeping on. (Male, female, polarity. Though it’s heresy in some quarters to say it, we’re all much more than a “gender” or “orientation”. A stereotype is a simply firm or fixed reference point in a world of changes, not something to attempt mistakenly to incarnate personally — impossible, anyway!)

How am I the High Priestess? How am I still the Magician? What has the Fool discovered so far of balance and polarity?

Each of us is a center from which good things ripple outwards to others. We matter more than we know, more than it can sometimes feel like we do. Any time spent in a true practice confirms this again and again.

/|\ /|\ /|\

Here’s a recent and unusual “comment” that ended up in the spam folder, even though it didn’t contain the typical hyperlinks that earn it instant spam status. (Track it to the originating URL, which I made sure not to include, and you land on a Russian-language small-equipment site. Go figure.) What caught my attention and rescued it from immediate deletion is its marketing build-up. Replace a few key phrases of this comment, and you could be talking about launching a physical exercise regimen, making prudent financial investments, improving your sex life, or learning a foreign language. It’s “Druidry” only in the very loosest sense. Here it is, punctuation unchanged:

Have you ever felt that you just don,t have the time to practise the Druidry that you want to? Wouldn‚t you like to be out in the woods meditating for hours, getting in tune with spirit and nature but the reality is a nine to five job in a town or city. You come home in the evening stressed and worn out and after you have spent some quality time with your partner, played with the kids and had some dinner, you just want to roll into bed. Then the whole sorry business starts again. I guess that like us you also thought of getting up half an hour early to have time for meditation or to greet the sun. You probably also have heard the alarm go off for that early start, reached out to turn it off and woken up exactly half an hour later at your normal getting up time. What if it didn‚t have to be like this? This is where Awen and the Art of Urban Druidry (with apologies to Robert M. Pirsig) comes in. Even in the most built up of cities there is life bursting out everywhere. The first stage on this path is to see it.

The comment treats spiritual practice as an addendum, something I can add to my diet like a supplement or vitamin, rather than where I live my life from. While “spirituality-as-supplement” is one perfectly valid way among others to begin, if a practice or spirituality doesn’t slowly and rightfully begin to pervade all I do, it’s not worth much — it’s not going to have the transformative effects I’m practicing it for in the first place. (More surprisingly, after such marketing language, the comment doesn’t follow through and offer its solution to the problem it identifies — “yours today for five easy payments of just $99/month!” And where’s the book? That title seems targeted for a quick spiritual pick-me-up.)

Very few Druids I know can regularly be found “out in the woods meditating for hours, getting in tune with spirit and nature”. This may occasionally happen at Gatherings — if we’re not seduced even then by the busy-ness of the Gathering schedule (here’s the wonderful but over-full, often double-booked, Feb 2019 Pantheacon schedule), or we forgo them altogether because if they’re any distance away, it takes fossil fuels to get there — or on long weekends, or vacations, or focused retreats.

A few solitaries may indeed carve out a daily block for deep meditation, by radically stripping away much else in their lives, sometimes including a partner. But it’s not a course specifically to recommend, or strive for, in the ordinary way of things. Plenty of Druids do little or no meditation — they’re fully engaged with other practices — you find the Druidry that works for you. Nor is some variety of meditation necessarily on the menu to set before newcomers. If I need to meditate for hours as my starting point, my chances of success, of sustaining such a rigorous practice, run from slim to none. (St. Paul counsels the Thessalonians to “pray without ceasing”, but that’s hardly a beginning practice for the new believer.) I gotta start where I am today, not from another place I have to go, just in order to begin.

The word “compromise” suffers these days — it’s practically equivalent in some circles to selling out, to treason, to soul-less complicity with the “Military-Industrial Complex” that president Eisenhower named over 50 years ago. Looking at all the many compromises every single one of us makes each day, I want to be mindful of my own first, before accusing anybody else. (Though you might not think so, to look at my comment on the opinion piece in the following paragraph!) I’ve taken the old song lyric as a matrix for vows and goals: “Let there be ____ on earth, and let it begin with me”. If Spirit can make headway with this 60-year old married Euro-American Druid-Eckist, using any part of my life as a center for change that might even deserve to ripple outward from there and influence others, then and only then do I have something to say to those others. If not, I’d best hold silence on such matters, listening to my trees when I can actually hear what they’re trying to tell me. Otherwise it’s all just another ego project that does little good for anybody.

looking west out our living room window

To get at this principle from the opposite direction, I’m now going to pick unfairly on a recent opinion piece in our local paper The Commons, titled “We have a choice: action or complicity“. (You can easily insert your own favorite divisive issue or polarizing problem or current controversy as the “choice”, without even reading the article). Such a self-righteous tone can feel really gratifying when we’re confident we’re perched on the “correct” side of the issue, and want to chastise all our weaker, conflicted, unprincipled neighbors who aren’t as woke and fired-up as we are about “Burning Issue-of-the-Day #327”. But attempts to ignite action through guilt, rather than offering a doable set of appealing steps that can start as soon as I set down the paper, haven’t exactly proven themselves as prime ways to effect change. And labeling the disengaged as “accessories after the fact”, as this opinion piece does those readers who sit out the controversy du jour and remain uninvolved in one particular struggle, probably will do little more than stir resentment at “damn liberals”. I’m a damn liberal myself in several ways, and even I grumble about damn liberals after reading the article.

In fact, most of us do have plenty of causes we’re committed to; it’s just that most of these causes are local, where we keep being admonished to act — they begin right here and now in our own lives: make rent, pay the mortgage, raise the kids, care for aging parents, save something for retirement, humor the crazy neighbor, pay off college tuition, care for our changing bodies, comfort a friend, invest time and passion into a love relationship, steady ourselves up for the next challenge, open ourselves to laughter and light wherever we can, and make of this world a home.

/|\ /|\ /|\

“What if it didn’t have to be like this?” asks the original comment.

Well, it doesn’t “have to be” like this, and it isn’t like this in the lives of Druids I know. Every one of them has found valid and authentic steps to begin to rein in consumption, live greener, hear the call of the awen, and honor the voices of the beings around them. From radically downsizing both living space and possessions, and “simplify-simplify-simplifying” (B in northern Vermont), to joining Native protests at the Dakota Access Pipeline, training with a Native teacher and working in a nursery (M in New Hampshire), to training and mentoring in permaculture and raising much of their own food (R in Pennsylvania), to super-insulating their house, driving an electric car, working full-time to grow low-cost public housing (W in southern Vermont), to living in cooperative housing, hand-crafting, and raising a child as a single parent (M in Massachusetts), Druids are living their Druidry woven in the fabric of what they do every day, not as an “add-on” squeezed into an already-full schedule.

So here I’ll repeat the words I opened with: Each of us, regardless of the labels slapped on to who we are or what we do, is a center from which good things already ripple outwards to others. We matter more than we know, more than it can sometimes feel like we do.

Wonderful series; I hope you’ll continue. I’m another square peg – endlessly resisting all attempts to assimilate, no matter where I wander. Somehow, I keep finding myself coming back to Christianity but not “that” Christianity, I say to myself – not the rigidly human-focused, hierarchical, be-a-good-girl version of my childhood. No, not that one but the magical, connected, generously giving version that was part of my childhood too – the one that did not exclude anyone or anything… I recognize glimpses of it in your writing and think Yes! That’s it! That’s it! What exactly is it though? I don’t really know yet but it’s worth the journey to find out.

From this and other recent comments, we can begin to suss out the kind of practice, experience and reconnection many of us are seeking. I’ll be drawing from Denise’s comment above a number of signposts, because in it she hits on a series of crucial aspects of a spiritual quest, Druid or otherwise. And because I’m a Druid blogger, I’m choosing and focusing on Seven Signposts we can identify there. I’ll launch each signpost with an excerpt from the comment:

“another square peg — resisting all attempts to assimilate”

We’re social beings, even the most formidably anti-social and hermit-like among us, predisposed to find a niche when we’re with others of our kind, like other intelligent and social mammals. So not feeling at home in our world can be a sometimes painful indicator that a spiritual journey is under way. Something’s shaken loose and ejected us from easy comfort with our situations and our social circles. It matches an inner resistance to the conventional niches on offer in our lives, if they don’t nourish and feed us as they should, as they used to, but no longer can.

So we shy away from sham spiritual landing pads, not trusting the footing they offer us. “I yearn to find where and how I fit, but I’ll be damned if I have to sell out to do so”, we seem to keep whispering to ourselves. A certain integrity deep inside us, one we instinctively hear and trust, warns us off the varied boxes, chains, handcuffs and cages we see around us, even as we can see the comfort they appear to bring to others. That makes it doubly hard to explain why we won’t join them in an adjoining cell. “If it works for them …” But it keeps on not working for us.

And in turn, this sense of not fitting in can often lead to …

“wander(ing)”

“Not all who wander are lost”, Tolkien reminds us, writing of the royal-heir-in-waiting Aragorn, but also of course of each of us — heirs like many mythic figures of more than meets our physical eyes. Lineage, heritage, ancestral bequest — it’s there. Or in 90s speak, “Exiled much?”

But the arms of our immense spiral journey can circle so widely, so far over the horizon, that we may have little sense of anything like a spiral at all, only of our wandering, our meandering, generally off the kind of track so many others around us seem to be following. (Though that, too, can be an illusion, given how good we are at “keeping up appearances” for each other.) At times, those same others may envy what they see in us as freedom, while not seeing the cost we keep paying. And we may envy the stable, settled, found-my-niche folks who envy us in turn, and for the same reason: dissatisfaction with The Way Things Are Now.

“keep finding myself coming back”

So we still face one of several paradoxes we’ve gotten to know far too well. Paired somewhat oddly with the previous meander, our wandering in out-of-the-way spaces and places intermittently offers that delicious sense of return. We can also feel like we’re circling around an inner shrine or ideal, even as we’re often barely half-aware it’s there. And if I notice a movement of return, it can often slip past, like one more part of my larger wanderings, which may not be comforting. Am I making any headway at all, or just circling the same dead-end? Is this zeroing in on something valid, or endlessly backtracking to something I’ve already tried and rejected?

And what is it that we’re coming back to? Often we can identify it as …

“magical, connected, generous”

We know these qualities because — somehow, somewhere — we’ve stood in the heart of such worlds, lands that feel more like home than home, places of wonder, communion, and flow. Or maybe we can pinpoint exactly when we experienced such realms, when we entered and when we left. In either case, yearning for them has at times consumed us, or still burns in the background as a steady low flame, a kind of pilot light of the spirit, alight through years or decades or — we may have a sense — through lifetimes.

Here at the midpoint, the fourth out of seven signposts, we stand where we’re going, we’ve arrived again where we’ve never been before, and other paradoxical ways of attempting to get into words the sense of …

“recogniz(ing) glimpses”

The haunting, beguiling, infuriating sense of recognition stalks us, not letting go. It’s both in us and outside, out front and behind, a kind of spiritual transfusion, a re-kindling, the light of a star for us “in dark places, when all other lights go out”, as Galadriel says to Frodo in Fellowship of the Ring. These archetypal, primal spiritual presences stand behind the varied forms of religions and cultures, never wholly removed from us, however dim our sight at the moment. They endure because we do, reaching us in ways we can perceive and understand, connect with, honor and revere, work with, pass on, adapt to our circumstances — but ideally not make a dogma out of, despite our best efforts to nail them down, clasp them in our hands, own them outright, box and sell them, fight and die for them. (Maybe instead I could live for them?!)

“No one comes to Spirit except through me”, to cite a “difficult” text of just one tradition, need not be a claim to religious exclusivity and spiritual imperialism: it can be a simple statement of spiritual reality. “If I want to get closer, I need to find the original, authentic me within”. Or if I ignore this counsel, I’ll come round the long way, better supplied the next time I meet up with a moment of spiritual reconnection with the acuity to sort wheat from chaff, gold from dross. A few more notches on my belt, scars on my face, tools for my need.

“There are two paths you can go by”, sing Led Zeppelin. “In the long run, there’s still time to change the road you’re on”. Yup, I’m in it for the long run. And a multitude of paths: we’re each on trails of our own, criss-crossing others, at times walking the main track, at others turning aside at a fork, a fallen tree across the way, a washed-out bridge over a chasm, a fiery guardian brandishing a cruel-looking scimitar.

“what exactly is it?”

“I’ll know it when I see it”. “It takes one to know one”. The melody we carry in our hearts will burst forth in the right circumstances, harmonizing with the First Song, the awen echoing in all things, the Word, the Bani, the Shabda, the Kalaam-i-Haqq, the Hu, the Voice of the Silence, and a thousand other names. In one sense the spiral we’re on never ends — we circle, always closer. In another sense, we’re the endpoint, we’re the spiral itself, and the spiritual quest can feel like chasing our own tails till we’re dizzy with it.

I take it as one measure of my place on the spiral whether my sense of “what exactly it is” happens to line up with others’ senses of it. If our sensibilities align, I know the gift of a way-station along my journey, and fellowship here. I may be able to work and grow with others, and find solace and companionship with them. If our senses don’t happen to line up just now, I walk solitary for a time. Familiar with both arms of the spiral, I try to honor where I am at the moment, and make the most of it. No judgment, no better-or-worse-than. Strive to honor the integrity of your own walk, counsel my guides and teachers.

“worth the journey”

In spite of everything, or because of it, we also carry an intimate sense that nothing else matters but this … whatever-it-is. Worth the journey, equal to and surpassing the pain, deserving our deepest dedication.

If, like me, you’ve “stepped away” on occasion, well, that too is a path, and will end up teaching more than the solitary person who walks it. We teach each other, most of all when no other teachers seem to paying attention to us, or we’re late to class, or we’ve lost the assignment, mislaid the text, dropped out, failed, skipped town, run off with a comely classmate to parts unknown. All our oldest tales tell of something similar. We’re in good company along the road.

/|\ /|\ /|\

We keep listening because we keep hearing hints. We keep looking because of what we’ve already seen. We walk across the darkened chamber because we have a sense of where at least some of the furniture looms, where a door behind this cabinet opens onto a realm of light.

The wisdom and practices of Christianity and Druidry together amplify each other, and for those who find resonance and insight in that happy confluence, a few more posts on the subject are in order.

And then it will be Spring Equinox — Autumn Down Under — and this old world will continue to knock in our bones and drum in our blood, while the spirit in us burns bright or dull, according to the myriad paths we traverse.

A series of recent comments here has been helpful to me, even as I try to gauge how to approach these posts, and how far and where to take them.

I had breakfast with a Druid friend this morning, a short while before he’ll be off for an extended cross-country skiing trip, far from regular tourist routes, hiking in and out, and camping and staying in trail-side shelters. I value him in part because he’s a good listener, and as a consistent character trait, he seeks to find balance in his own reactions to his daily inner and outer life, even as he shares them with others. It makes for some priceless insights, if I shut up to catch them.

Such reflection is a gift, something to cherish and encourage in others. I try to listen here in the same spirit, when you comment in posts about what’s going on in your worlds and experiences. Often of course I don’t not know enough of your circumstances to comment usefully, but I keep listening partly for that very reason. Who knows the whole story, even of our own lives? (The late ABC commentator Paul Harvey called his popular broadcast The Rest of the Story. We keep paying attention, if we’re wise, because the story hasn’t ended yet by any means, and we’re all part of it, telling our piece as we live it. And if you suspect reincarnation is an accurate aspect of the story, its chapters can grow quite lengthy indeed.) Listening, patience, gratitude: a triad cutting across all traditions, proven countless times over and over in its profound power.

Krista writes:

Dean, I’m always especially interested when you write on this particular topic. Having been raised in the Christian Faith, and having had no quarrel with the Christianity of my youth, my own Druid practice always has something of a Christian flavor to it even though I no longer consider myself a Christian. But I don’t consider myself Pagan either. Always was a bit of a square peg. So throughout my Druid journey I’ve become very comfortable blending and assimilating and it works quite well in my private practice. It’s a bit more challenging in community practice, but I’m working on it and I adapt when it’s called for. I think it would do the Druid community a world of good to acknowledge, and have more discussion about, different Druid perspectives rather than focusing almost exclusively on the Pagan perspective. Thanks for taking it on!

How many of us hear even a part of our own experiences in what Krista shares here? Neither Christian or Pagan. It’s a perspective and an experience I suspect is more common than we recognize. “Square-pegged-ness” could probably define a number of us, and in fact much contemporary spiritual practice across traditions echoes this sense of having to find and tread our own paths. Because what price “purity” of belief or practice strictly within the confines of one tradition or school, church or community, if spiritually we’re suffocating or starving there? It can take a deal of work just to recognize such a priority, and honor such a spiritual imperative.

The influx of the divine that swirled and took shape in and around Christianity still has valid things to teach us, even as individual churches and whole communions and major denominations struggle to find their way. The existence today of over 20,000 Protestant denominations, to say nothing of other Christian traditions, testifies to the difficulty of satisfying the questing individual soul with system and conformity, doctrine and creed.

Group practice and community often mean more to many people than words of affirmation recited at a particular portion of the weekly service, though they may describe much of value, too. But the flame that burns at the heart of what is called Christianity does not appear to keep itself neatly smouldering within any bounds set by humans, any more than it does in other spiritualities. If it did, how much would it really be worth? Instead, it kindles and warms anyone who brushes up against it for any length of time. Inconveniently so, dynamically so, wonderfully and provocatively and endlessly “inspiritingly” so.

What other perspectives or flavors of Druidry do we often overlook, besides the Christian one(s)?

Until we can begin to answer that question adequately, I’m borrowing, for the space of a quotation anyway, some monotheistic but non-Christian flavor from Tolkien’s Silmarillion, hearing in it an echo of Druidic awen, and a further gift of the elemental fire that kindles us all:

Then the themes of Ilúvatar shall be played aright, and take Being in the moment of their utterance, for all shall then understand fully his intent in their part, and each shall know the comprehension of each, and Ilúvatar shall give to their thoughts the secret fire, being well pleased.

And disabledhikernh writes:

Thank you for this post. I am hard pressed to find other Druid Christians, so I have felt kind of isolated as such. Now I don’t 🙂

Isolation, that challenge to solitaries — and how many of us are solitary, even if we enjoy a local community of others, before and after we gather with them? The anvil of solitude can forge us spiritually in ways nothing else can, though the costs can be correspondingly high.

(One of my spiritual practices, for what it’s worth, found in other interesting places, too: If this experience is happening for me rather than only to me, what can I take from it? Where can I travel with it? What doors does it open, and not just close? What beauties glow behind the doors? What deities flare and bloom there? How far, I whisper to myself, half in fear, half in wonder, how far can I really go?)

Stevehas been sharing something of his journey in previous comments, and writes:

This series of posts is proving to be a thoughtful and thought provoking treatment of what is a “delicate” subject in many circles. When I first encountered some of your earlier posts on the intersection of druidry and christianity I admit to taking a very cautious approach, almost an attitude of “this is too good to be true”. With time to read and think about what you are saying it seems more likely that you are speaking from hard won, first hand experience. Thank you for doing this.

“Delicate” is apt. Steve’s caution here sounds at least as hard-won — and needful — as any experience of mine, and vice-versa. My caution in how definitively I assert something, how deep I dig, how far I push, what I ask that I can’t answer, is ongoing. Rather than encounter walls, or provoke readers unnecessarily with observations I can’t back up from experience, I want to explore respectfully — mostly so I miss as little as possible of value as I go.

One of the most startling overlaps or intersections of traditions for me happened during an initiation. I still don’t know altogether what it “means”, though it was over five years ago now. In a clear inner encounter, all the more unexpected because I hadn’t opened a Bible in many years, I saw how

out of his mouth came a sharp two-edged sword; and his face was like the sun shining in its strength (Revelation 1:20).

Rather than “meaning” anything at first, the experience shaped me within its own context, just like other profound experiences, whether of pain or joy, grief or wonder, which we analyze only later, and put labels on, as we “process” them, seeking to incorporate or reject them, expanding or contracting them to “fit” what we can accept at the time. At the time, this experience confirmed for me the energy and love behind the initiation, flagging it as powerfully memorable.

Milan’s bosco verticale — vertical forest, completed in 2018*.

(After a car accident over three decades ago now, I surveyed the overturned and totaled car I’d been driving, walked gingerly over a puddle of broken glass to retrieve my wallet, flung from the dash out the window by the impact, massaged a sore neck that was my only physical outcome of the event, and marveled in gratitude that no one had been hurt. Anything the accident “meant” came only later: Insurance claims. My sometimes-psychic brother, agitated all morning before my phone call home to explain what happened and ask to be picked up. The eventual replacement of the car. The job interview I was returning from, the mantra I’d been chanting, my mindset, the weather, the other driver, and so on.)

Part of the gift of the initiation experience is that I was largely able to let go of what it “meant” at first and focus on accepting its effects on my awareness. What it “meant” and “means” has continued to unfold, though not necessarily along “orthodox” lines. And that no doubt drives some of what I write here. Images and metaphors as divine “transparencies” or hierophanies, ways to connect to the limitless, ways it “shines through”, are part of our spiritual furniture, and part of my bias or individuality or inner architecture. They may or may not be yours, but you have yours.

How often we’re put off by language — or drawn in and inspired, and for mostly the same reasons. The first piece of wise Druid counsel above comes, in fact, from Luke 5:16, describing what Jesus often did. Seems like a piece of uncommon good sense these days for anyone to practice, a sacred intention to add to our hours.

Another version* puts it like this: “Jesus often went away to other places to be alone so that he could pray”. Does that feel like anything most of us need to do regularly, to get off by ourselves so we can hear ourselves and our awen speak, and not merely listen to the strident echoes of the “24-hour news cycle”? Hear what life is constantly saying to the chakras and energy centers of our being**.

The second line above comes from Matthew 3:11-12, where John the Initiating Chief (Christians may know him as John the Baptist) names the powers he and Jesus invoke when blessing and hallowing others who seek out that particular ritual. Water, spirit, fire. What is baptism but blessing — literally, dipping in water and other holy substances or elements? A baptism in an initiation, and vice versa, symbolized by elements that have always been holy worldwide: water and fire, and spirit that animates them all. Call them elemental sacraments as I have, if that brings them into closer kinship and familiarity and comfort.

/|\ /|\ /|\

One of my teachers observed that just as we can choose to go through initiations organized and conducted by others, we can initiate intentions and directions in our own lives. An actual ritual can help to impress this on the mind and senses, reifying it, to use technical language — making it “thingly”, bringing it through “right down to the physical”.

So I find my own ways of slipping away into wilderness to pray, listen to the trees, sing the awen, and prepare.

And initiation? Many have long looked at the Biblical Book of Revelation as a guide to our inner spiritual architecture, with the seven churches it describes in detail as the varying focus and health of our seven inner energy centers, typified in various traditions as chakras or by other names, the spiritual eye among them, along with the halos on pictures of saints, the sacred heart, the gut instinct, and so on — yet another piece of the philosophia perennis, the Perennial Wisdom we cloak with our regional robes, names and forms, then “name and claim” as the Sole Truth of the cosmos (which we just so happen to be in exclusive possession of).

So you have a vision, and it’s natural to be told to get it down in words before it fades:

Write, therefore, what you have seen, what is now and what will take place later. The mystery of the seven stars that you saw in my right hand and of the seven golden candles is this: The seven stars are the messengers of the seven Gatherings, and the seven candles are the seven Gatherings. (Revelation 1:20).

Then you work to initiate your vision, with the Messengers (Instant or otherwise), and the Light sources you find at hand, LED, spiritual, human. A little paraphrase that I assert does no injustice to the original, and we’re on Druid territory. And why not vice versa? Rework a Druid ritual in Christian terms, and see what you may discover.

We can initiate or baptize our complete body, energies centers all working together, to (re)call it to its holy purpose as an Ancestor-in-the-Making, a Walker-between-the-Worlds, a Holy One. If the world around us, or some other world we’ve walked in lately, seems sacred or holy, or some other ideal summons us, we can “level ourselves up”, to use the language of gamers — shift energy and consciousness, so that we mirror and embody — incarnate — that holiness, rather than working against it.

So I choose the time of ritual with care, honoring the harmonics of the planets and stars, the tides of earth and our lives. Three days, or maybe seven, beforehand, I slip away to the wilderness and pray. As part of my ritual — perhaps the core of initiation, or perhaps other words come — I say, “I bless and consecrate you with water … with spirit, and with fire”.

And perhaps I close with some version of the blessings from recent posts, drinking what seems right to drink, making an offering from that drink to whoever it feels right to honor at the moment of the rite:

I now invoke the mystery of communion, that common unity that unites all beings throughout the worlds. All beings spring from the One; by One are they sustained, and in One do they find their rest. One the hidden glory rising through the realms of Abred; One the manifest glory rejoicing in the realms of Gwynfydd; One the unsearchable glory beyond all created being in Ceugant; and these three are resumed in One.

May the blessing of the Uncreated One, of the Creative Word and of the Spirit that is the Inspirer be with us always …

/|\ /|\ /|\

*Easy-to-Read Version, 2006, Bible League International.

**Whoever has ears, let them hear what the Spirit says to the churches (Rev. 2:29).

It’s almost never “just me”. Even when we “dare to bare” our hearts on social media (a perilous adventure), where this plaintive question seems to pop up frequently. Living in a cosmos of other beings, it’s almost always something more, ultimately so likely that it’s safe to make it a default setting on our outlooks. (Sometimes, however, you do need to choose the best audience to share it with. Many humans understand much less of such things than most trees, for instance. Looking for solidarity and confirmation? Share it with a tree first!) Encounters everywhere, reminding us, calling to us, engaging us to look beyond “just me”.

Here’s a night visitor to a Vermont Druid in the northern part of the state — a lovely barred owl (Strix varia).

Barred owl, 15 Feb. 2019. Photo courtesy Sue S.

Wherever we are, whatever we’re doing, it’s always about more than just me.